All right, let's remain standing here this morning. We will read the law as we begin our worship service, just considering ourselves before a holy God and kind of divided up our passage that we're actually looking at as our text to read the law and gospel this morning. And a couple of different portions of it begin in the beginning of Daniel chapter 8. In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar, a vision appeared to me, Daniel, after which appeared to me at the first. And I saw in the vision. And when I saw, I was in Susa, the citadel, which is in the province of Elam. And I saw in the vision, and I was at the Ulai Canal. I raised my eyes and saw, and behold, a ram standing on the bank of the canal. It had two horns, and both horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. I saw the ram charging westward and northward and southward. No beast could stand before him, and there was no one who could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great. As I was considering, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground, and the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. He came to the ram with the two horns, which I had seen standing on the bank of the canal, and he ran at him in his powerful wrath. I saw him come close to the ram, and he was enraged against him and struck the ram and broke his two horns. And the ram had no power to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground and trampled on him. And there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power. Then the goat became exceedingly great. But when he was strong, the great horn was broken. And instead of it, there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven. Out of one of them came a little horn, which grew exceedingly great toward the south, toward the east, and toward the glorious land. It grew great even to the host of heaven. And some of the host and some of the stars with it threw down to the ground and trampled on them. It became great, even as great as the prince of the host. And the regular burnt offering was taken away from him. And the place of his sanctuary was overthrown. And a host will be given over to it together with the regular burnt offering because of transgression. And it will throw truth to the ground and it will act and prosper. Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to the one who spoke, how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled underfoot? And he said to me, for 2,300 evenings and mornings. Then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state." Continuing in verse 19, he said, behold, I will make known to you what shall be at the latter end of the indignation. for it refers to the appointed time of the end. As for the ram you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. And the goat is the king of Greece. And the great horn between his eyes is the first king. As for the horn that was broken in place of which four others arose, four kingdoms shall arise from his nation, but not with his power. And at the latter end of their kingdom, when the transgressors have reached their limit, a king of bold face, one who understands riddles, shall arise. His power shall be great, but not by his own power. And he shall cause fearful destruction and shall succeed in what he does and destroy mighty men and the people who are the saints." And I'll finish there as we think about God's judgment that's coming upon Brothers and sisters, and then at the very end, and I hope you'll see why this is the good news. When I, Daniel, had seen the vision, I sought to understand it. And behold, there stood before me one having the appearance of a man. And I heard a man's voice between the banks of the Uli. And it called, Gabriel, make this man understand the vision. So he came near where I stood. And when he came, I was frightened and fell on my face. But he said to me, understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end. And when he had spoken to me, I fell into a deep sleep with my face to the ground. But he touched me and made me stand up. And then picking up in verse 25, by his cunning he shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and in his own mind he shall become great. Without warning he shall destroy many, and he shall even rise up against the prince of princes, and he shall be broken, but by no human hand. The vision of the evenings and the mornings that has been told is true, but seal up the vision for it refers to many days from now. And I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. Then I rose and went about the king's business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it. Let's pray together. Father, we think about the gospel and we think about the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom it always points. And this is true of this passage as well. And I think about how Daniel did not understand the vision that he saw, and how every week we pray that you would take the veil off of our eyes so that we would understand the more of the Lord Jesus. You're the only one that can do that, Father, because in ourselves we are not prone to see him, because he's foolishness to us. in his common ordinary flesh and it takes you to open our eyes so that we can understand the truth of what Christ has done and of who he is. So I would ask that you would be gracious to us as we assemble together this morning to teach us about Christ and that your Holy Spirit would be pleased to come into our midst to lead us into worship and to the truth of our triune God. And we ask you hear our prayer in Jesus name. Amen. We are in Daniel 8, and this morning we're going to go down to the river to pray, to study about the good old way. It's a song I was just listening to in the car on the way here. I love that Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack. It's just one of the best. I've been singing that song for a couple of days because rivers are absolutely fascinating things to me. You can sit there on a shore of a river, anywhere you want, along its banks, and it will never stop flowing. Have you ever thought about that? It's mind boggling. How in the world can that be? Back in the early days of our nation, Thomas Jefferson had just made the greatest real estate investment in world history when he paid $15 million for the Louisiana purchase. From Louisiana to Montana, $15 million. It's incredible. To find out what kind of an investment he made, he sent Lewis and Clark up the Mississippi River. at St. Louis, into the Missouri, and then into Montana, and then down the Columbia into Washington to the Pacific. Without those rivers, exploration would have been exceedingly difficult and dangerous. At the same time as they were crossing the West, the pioneers had many great obstacles in their way, and probably the worst was the rivers. No bridges meant that there were many long, dangerous hours trying to figure out how to get the caravans of these lumbering Conestogas across these rivers safely. Rivers also provide the main source of water for almost all people on the earth, and without them, there would be no life on this planet, pure and simple. Over the millennia, their water has been so precious that wars have been fight over those who get the rights to them. But thinking about rivers is also an existential proposition. In a word, they depict in living color the flow of time. They wax, they wane. They run rapids, they run placid. They run shallow, they run deep. And I started thinking of some of our poets writing about the rivers. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has this poem called To the River, Charles. And it says, river that in silence wind us, through the meadows bright and free, till at length thy rest thou findest in the bosom of the sea. Four long years of mingled feeling, half in rest and half in strife, I have seen thy water sealing onward like the streams of life. Thomas Campbell writes in The River of Life, the more we live, the more brief appear our life's succeeding stages. A day to childhood seems a year, and years like passing ages. The gladsome current of our youth, air passions yet disorders. Steel's lingering like a river smooth along its grassy borders. One of my favorite songs from my favorite singer, Dan Fogelberg, is called The River. He ends his first album with it, and it talks about his whole life. He says, I was born by a river, rolling past a town, given no direction, just told to keep my head down. I was raised by a river, weaned upon the sky, and in the mirror of the waters I saw myself learn to cry. I ran from the river, far as I could see. And as the sun hit my shoulders, I felt it burning me. How I longed for the waters as the fire raged. How I longed for the river as I aged. I will die by a river as it rolls away. Bury me in the nighttime. Do not waste the day." I want you to be thinking about rivers as we begin this sermon. Daniel 8 unfolds in two places. The first is in the citadel or the palace of the ancient city of Susa in modern southwestern Iran, which back then was called Elam. This is not a coincidence, as it was the setting in Elam, which is far to the east of Babylon, that becomes the place where the first image, which describes the Medes and the Persians, particularly Cyrus the Great, the king of Anshan, he came from there. This city is nestled just southwest of the Zargos Mountains, and it was settled between three rivers, or tributaries, which in flood stage actually merged together. One of these is the second place of Daniel's vision. He's transported to the Ulai Canal, the ESV says. Now, while we know from archeology that there was a canal that ran just north of Susa, The idea of seeing a vision by one of the rivers makes for a better setting. It also makes for a good parallel in Daniel 12 where we see a man clothed in linen who's above the waters of the river and he starts talking. and it makes for a more exciting unfolding of this vision. Some of the translations go with Daniel standing by the sides of a stream or a river. I like that better than canal. If for nothing else, it helps you to visualize what he's gonna be seeing better. Now like chapter seven, the vision of chapter eight has a time stamp. First verse says it's in the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar. Now this puts it two years after chapter seven's vision of the beasts and the heavenly divine council scene where Christ comes like a son of man. This is the third and the final vision that takes place during Belshazzar's reign. And like the last chapter, this date might not be incidental because it was in this year that the Medo-Persian empire subsumed Lydia, the great power of the Western world that the Assyrians were never able to fully conquer. given the topic of the vision of assimilating other countries. This certainly is at least an interesting coincidence and it would have made for a nice analogy of the vision that begins to unfold. Let's look at the structure very quickly of the passage because it's always important to consider in terms of how we think about what is important in the text. First chapter eight returns us for the first time since chapter one to the Hebrew portion of Daniel. The book finishes all the way through to the end of the book now in the tongue of the Jews. It's been in Aramaic and now it goes back to Hebrew. It's been suggested that this happens in order to give a deeper credibility to these chapters because they're prophetic and Hebrew is the language of the prophets. More to the point, I think it shows that the things unfolding in them now don't deal with places in Babylon but places in Israel. which is where they're from. So whatever the case, whyever the change of language exists, this creates a new chiasm with the remaining chapters. So that chapter eight is going to parallel chapter 11, and we will look at that more as we go into the coming weeks. Now it's tempting to outline the chapter similarly to how it was tempting to outline the previous chapter where you simply have a vision and then an interpretation and that's it. But as we saw in chapter 7, that doesn't quite work. It doesn't help us see the really important parts of it that are highlighted in the structure. It's better to see something like a chiasm even in chapter 8, although this is not as formal, where the center or the most important highlight of this chapter is when the angels appear on the scene to Daniel. And that's what I read for the beginning of the gospel this morning. Another interesting way of looking at this chapter is to look at it like a river through a series of risings and fallings, okay? Daniel lifts his eyes when he sees the ram rise in power, then the ram falls. because there's no one to deliver it. Then a goat becomes great. He rises, his strength is shattered. A little horn becomes great and rises above the stars. Then his demise is announced. Light begins to dawn on Daniel. He rises, then he falls to the floor overcome, and then he's lifted back up to his feet, only to be left confused at the very end of the chapter. It's like a river, and I'm gonna try and take you through it like that, as kind of an analogy as we go along. So the chapter itself takes us on to a vision into the future, that is, Daniel's future, with its ebbs and flows of time and life and difficulty and death and conquest and all those kinds of things. It does so through images that are in some ways similar to chapter 7, And here's some of these similarities. They both depict kingdoms as animals. They both depict rulers as animals with horns. They both culminate in the rise of a sinister little horn. They both bring out the pride of man. And an angel interprets both. But there are differences. The time frames are not identical. The kinds of animals are totally different. in the two visions. Chapter 8 is more specific in its interpretation. And of course, the languages are different as well. I'm gonna point out a couple of these for you to be thinking about here. Someone astutely noticed, in contrast to the wild and political imagery of chapter seven, with the crazy beasts, remember all these fantastical images, this chapter is built from domestic sanctuary animals. And its focus is not so much political, but moral and religious. In fact, Daniel 8 is full of sanctuary language. This includes the visionary animals that were used for sacrifices, especially on the Day of Atonement, which was the day of the cleansing of the sanctuary, the ram and the goat. As such, we will see that the focus of our chapter is not on God's eschatological people, the church, like it was last time. It's on God's typological people, the Jews. These are the people who foreshadow the church. And as such, Daniel 8 is going to teach us that history repeats itself through acts as a great teaching age of what to expect throughout history until the culmination of the second coming when Jesus finally returns to make all things right. To put that another way, Israel, which is a type of the church, and her history that we will look at here is a type of things that will continue to happen throughout history. So let's move into the passage. See the setting that we've described in chapters one and two. Daniel then begins to explain strange things that he saw. He says, I raised my eyes, see the first rising there, and behold, a ram standing on the bank of the canal. It had two horns, and both horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. This first rising is a way of thinking about this. I want to have you in your memory as you're thinking about what you're looking at. Assume that the river is flowing high right now. The ram's on the opposite bank from Daniel and Daniel cannot cross over it. There's too much water, it's running too fast off the rugged peaks above. At first, the beast is simply standing there. It has two horns, which is perfectly normal, but these horns are lopsided. One appears higher than the other. Then the strangeness comes. He apparently saw both horns growing out of the head right before his eyes. The larger horn grew up last. Suddenly the beast begins charging. Now usually rams will charge each other in mating rituals to see who will get the female, but this is just one ram. It seems though that there are other animals around. Verse four says, I saw the ram charging westward and northward and southward. No beast could stand before him and there was no one who could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great. Now, I think it's unusual to describe a ram as a beast that no other animal could defeat. And I think most people do too, unless you're a CSU fan. But unlike those rams, this ram defeats all of his opponents. Okay? And so he becomes the king of beasts. Now this is a strange thing to ponder, and that's exactly what Daniel was doing when suddenly he saw a new animal. As I was considering, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground. This ram had been charging north, south, east, north, south, and west, but when it came too far west, suddenly it's met by a goat that is so fast it seems to fly and never touched the ground. Now imagine that the river has gotten very low right now and the goat has no problem crossing to the ram's side. Looks like it's running on the top of the water. Now, I would normally put money, actually, on a ram beating a goat. In this case, my money would be poorly spent. I think this actually parallels the medals in the idol. Remember in Chapter 2 where each succeeding medal is lesser? That's what's happening here. The ram should be beating the goat. It doesn't happen. The goat is even more unusual than the ram. He had a singular horn between his eyes. It's a unigoat. I don't know what else to call it. Recall that we saw horns in the beast in chapter seven. They refer to individual kings. Here the unigoat sees the ram and begins to charge at him in his powerful wrath. The goat is angry. The ram has encroached on his territory. As the enraged goat charge happens, he strikes the ram and breaks his two horns. Now the water's at its lowest point, the ram falls. At that moment, his power is completely destroyed. It says the ram had no power to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground and trampled on him. And there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power. Now the goat becomes the king of beasts. Who would have ever thought? Imagine the waters now rising higher than they were at the beginning. It overflows its banks. It mirrors the bizarre beast and its power. It says, the goat became exceeding great, but the height of his power, when he was strong, the great horn was broken. Imagine again, suddenly the river dries up almost completely. The goat now falls with the water level. In its place, four lesser horns grow up, and out of one of them, Another one grows up. These four horns grow up toward the four winds of the heaven like they're really cattywampus. These are not straight horns. I want you to think again of the water level rising. Are you getting riverboat sick as we talk about this? The unigoat becomes truly monstrous in its appearance. But then, One of these horns grows a horn on top of it. This is even more bizarre. This horn grows exceedingly great. In verse 9, toward the south, the east, and toward the glorious land. The animal is now standing still like the ram was at first. Gazing southwest, far past the rapids, he has tunnel vision. He sees far away, his sight, his mind, his will is bent on Israel. As it stood there, it started to grow, taller and taller, higher and higher. It rose even to the host of heaven. It began to throw down some of the host and some of the stars of heaven. It threw them down to the ground and began to trample on them. The stars were like clods of dirt under its hooves. Its power became greater, even as great as the prince of the host. Now I wanna spend a moment here. The host of heaven and the stars. These are two terms that refer to the heavenly beings. We're about to see two of them in this chapter, which can't be a coincidence. The prince of the host appears earlier in the Bible by the very same title in Joshua 5.14. Joshua sees a man and becomes terrified. The man then identifies himself as the commander of the army of the Lord. You say, well, wait a minute, you just told me it's the exact same title. It is. It's unfortunate that the ESV translates one as the commander of the army and the other as the prince of the host, because guess what? It's the exact same Hebrew words. We can identify this person even better because he says that the place Joshua's standing is holy ground, therefore he must take off his sandals. We go back earlier to a scene with Moses where the angel of the Lord tells Moses the exact same thing. Therefore, this is none other than Christ in the Old Testament. And thus Daniel sees this goat with the little horn becoming as powerful as Christ himself. I'm going to say more about this in a moment, because it's important that you understand how and why this happens. But now comes the truly amazing thing. Incredibly, Daniel sees that, quote, the regular burnt offering was taken away from him, that is, from the prince of the host. And even more, the place of his sanctuary is overthrown. How interesting. that it's a goat that takes away the burnt offering. What man has the power to defy God himself and rise higher than the angel of the Lord? Verse 12 is extremely difficult to translate. The ESV says a host will be given over to it together with the regular burnt offering. What in the world does that mean? Well, the Septuagint says, and a sin offering was given for the sacrifice, and righteousness was cast down to the ground, and it practiced, and it prospered. The idea there seems to be that some kind of an evil sacrifice will be made in God's house. The Latin reads even different, and the strength was given him against the continual sacrifice. In that interpretation, the idea is that the little horn becomes powerful enough to stop sacrifices in the house of God. The word host is the same as what we saw in the previous verse. The Greek and Latin assume that it has a different meaning in that verse. Let's assume it's the same meaning. Let's assume it means army, prince of the army. That's the word host. It may or may not be the same army. Some translations read the army as the people of the house of God, meaning either the priests who take care of the house or the Jews themselves, in which case they're given over to the power of the little horn. Others read it as the host of the heavens. In a continuation of the previous verse, that seems to make the most sense to me, but what would it mean that the host of heaven are given over to the power of the horn? Well, it could mean that this horn will have power that overcomes theirs, or it could mean that he will put a new heavenly host in charge of God's house, in which case he will desecrate it. In fact, all of these interpretations, as we will see, could be correct. The key part here is that this happens because of transgression. See that? The transgression belongs to those who worship in the house of God. And in fact, in Daniel 9, we see that that's exactly how Daniel takes this. The result of this is horrific. It says, is thrown to the ground, and the little horn will act and prosper in whatever he does. All right, that's kind of the main part of the vision. Suddenly, it's interrupted. Daniel hears someone lamenting and someone else answering. They're called holy ones. This is the same language used of the saints of the Most High in chapter seven. When we were there last week, I said that this term can refer to angels or to God's people. And I said, in that case, I think it refers to both. Here it clearly refers to angelic beings. One cries out like Jeremiah in Lamentations. He says, for how long? You have to imagine him just screaming that out. For how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled underfoot? For how long? It's a great question because is it possible that God himself could be thwarted by man really? Here's the answer. only if it were temporary and God permitted it in his sovereign decree. And even then, if God did that, who would really have the power? That's the very same question we raised with Nebuchadnezzar. The answer comes, and as it does, imagine that the river is sinking all the way to a dry wadi. They had no water in it now. He said to me, for 2,300 evenings and mornings, then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state. Now, this is the fall of the horn and the simultaneous rise of the sanctuary. Word on this number 2300 is an order because because this is the temple that's in mind and because according to law and offering was made every evening and morning. This could refer to 1150 days. or slightly less than three and a half years. But it could also refer to 2,300 days as well. Scholars are divided on their opinion on that. But as we will see, it doesn't really matter because the fulfillment includes both numbers. This is the end of the vision, properly speaking. Now while the sights of the animals trail out of sight, Daniel is nevertheless still on the banks of the Uli. and he sought to understand it. Suddenly there stood before me one having the appearance of a man. Now some take this as a reference to the son of man in chapter seven and therefore to Christ in the Old Testament, but this is incorrect. He is not said to be a son of man, but to be a giber, which is variously translated as a man, a mighty one, or a warrior. However, Daniel then hears a man's voice right after it, and that's the word, Adam. This is the one like the Son of Man. His voice comes between the banks of the Uli. I imagine that the waters are now very high and raging. In fact, in a parallel in Ezekiel, who's about to hear from this very same son of man. It says that he heard the sound of the wings of the host of heaven like the sound of many waters, like the sound of the Almighty, a sound of tumult and the sound of an army. John sees the same person, and he says his voice was like the roar of many waters. Who is this person? Well, he's none other than the prince of the host, or as he will later be called, Michael. His voice goes to the other angel who is called Gabriel. He says, make this man understand the vision. This is Gabriel's commander. Curiously, Gabriel's the only other named angel in the Bible beside Michael, only two of them. The word is a play on the word geber that I just told you about, man or a warrior. His name means God is my hero, my warrior, or my man. In 1 Enoch, Gabriel's put in charge of paradise and is one of the other archangels along with Sariel and Raphael who punished the Nephilim. Closer to home in Daniel, he is clearly a warrior and he appears once in the New Testament, remember when this was? To announce the birth of the Messiah. Which in my view means that in both of his appearances in the Bible, he is closely associated with Christ. Gabriel came and stood by Daniel. I imagine that the waters are subsiding again. Gabriel's voice is not like that of Yahweh's. Nevertheless, he's a frightening creature. In verse 17, and when he came, I was frightened and fell on my face. Another fall, you see the rising and the falling throughout this? Gabriel spoke to the prophet and he was prostrate. He says, understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end. Now this trips a lot of people up right here. It's important to understand that Daniel is echoing a verse in Habakkuk, which can help bring some clarity to the meaning of this verse. Habakkuk says, for still the vision awaits its time, it hastens to the end, it will not lie. The end there is not the end of all things, but of the appointed time of God's choosing for the vision. Certain things have to happen and then it will be fulfilled. Daniel wants to know what those things are. Now as Gabriel was speaking to Daniel, he fell into a deep sleep with his face to the ground. He was simply overwhelmed by the vision and he had no more strength. But Gabriel touched me and made me stand. I think about the songs that we were singing about Psalm 91, his angels are near us and he brings them close to us to take care of us. He gives Daniel strength. It says, he touched me and made me stand. Again, imagine the waters. All of a sudden, the mighty river is rising again as Daniel's strength is returned. The point is, the river is showing you the ebbs and flows of life. He who fell is made to rise, and upon him a light of interpretation is now going to dawn. Now we get into the meat of this thing, verses 19 through 26. This is the interpretation of Gabriel, of the vision of Daniel. This is where we now begin to see how chapter eight differs in time frame from chapter seven, where we said that describes the fall of the temple in 70 AD. This is gonna take us through the rivers of time, down several centuries, but not up to the birth of Christ. But this is a typological vision of other things, and one that the people of God needed to heed when it was fulfilled so that they might be better prepared for their Messiah who was coming. It's still one whose lessons we can learn and have us teach today. So Gabriel in verse 19 begins, behold, I will make known to you what shall be at the latter end of the indignation, for it refers to the appointed time of the end. Now, the indignation refers to the events surrounding the little horn and his blasphemous attempt to set himself above God. The end then refers to the end of the little horn. It says, as for the ram that you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. I want you to remember in chapter seven, this was the second beast. He was the lopsided bear. Now it's a ram with lopsided horns. They're parallel to one another. It's lopsided because this little horn is Darius the Mede. He's the guy who began ruling in Babylon, but he only lasted about two years, then he died. Then Cyrus the Persian ruled for a very long time. So we have a continuing of that idea of this lopsided double kingdom, the Medes and Persians. Much more important than the ram is the goat. The goat is the king of Greece, and the great horn between his eyes is the first king. So who would that be? Well, it's Alexander the Great. Alexander was born on July 20th, 356 BC in the kingdom of Macedonia in Greece. Prior to his rise, Greece was a series of city-states. That's when all the philosophy took place. Over 100 years earlier, the Persians tried to invade Greece as the ram was charging west, remember that? They first stopped the Persian king, Darius the Great, in 492, when the Athenians won the famous Battle of Marathon. Then again, they defeated King Xerxes in 479, about 20 years later. This was a year after Leonidas led the Spartans to the Hell's Gate, where 300 Spartans held off a million Persians for several days in the Battle of Thermopylae. If you've ever seen 300 or read the book Gates of Fire, it talks about that incredible battle. Alexander was Grecian retribution such as the world had never seen. This guy was barely in his 20s. He unites the city states. He creates the greatest empire in history. In 10 short years, he moves from Greece through Turkey, south into Africa, past Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, into western India, almost to Nepal, and maybe as far as western China in 10 years. Hell-bent on conquest, who knows what the empire would have looked like if he had lived another 20 years. But at age 32, still a youthful emperor, he succumbed probably to malaria in the year 323 in the city of Babylon. Upon his death, four generals fought for the empire. In short order, it was subdivided into four parts. And this is precisely what Gabriel now explains, some 300 years before it happened. He says, as for the horn that was broken, in place of which four others arise, four kingdoms shall arise from his nation, but not with his power. In fact, no one in history, except maybe Genghis Khan, could boast the realm of Alexander. Two of the lesser kings, Cassander and Lysimachus, eventually ruled over just Greece. Ptolemy and Seleucus received 80% of this empire, with Ptolemy being south and Seleucus being east. And as often happened to the tiny promised land, it found itself right in the middle of kings fighting to rule it. At first, Ptolemy had it. But after a few years, the descendants of Cellulose took control. Then in 175 BC, so we're 150 years after Alexander now, the great, great, great grandson of Cellulose, a man named Antiochus IV Epiphanes became king. Now, Antiochus Epiphanes is his throne name. His birth name was Mithrandates. His throne name means God made manifest. Almost all commentators agree that this man is the little horn that came out of one of the four of Daniel's vision. Gabriel says, and at the end, the latter end of their kingdom, when the transgressors have reached their limit, A king of bold face, one who understands riddles, shall arise. Now let's talk about this verse for a bit, verse 23. There's already been many kings since Seleucus, and Gabriel uses biblical language. He says their transgressors have reached their limit. That's how he describes this. Way back in Abraham's day, God said this about the wicked inhabitants of Canaan. He said, when the iniquity of the Amorites is completed, See, God gives to each group of people a set period of time to inhabit and rule. He is patient, even with the wicked Nephilim Amorites, whose sins only increased over time. But eventually their time runs out. What that limit is, only God himself knows. The first and second books of Maccabees comment on this timeframe. 1 Maccabees describes the decades after Alexander died and the wars that ensued, bringing chaos to the entire world, and it calls them evils were multiplied in the earth. This led to the rise of Antiochus. 2 Maccabees is an ancient commentary on this. It says, in the case of the other nations, the Lord waits patiently to punish them until they have reached the full measure of their sins. But he does not deal in this way with us in order that he may not take vengeance on us afterward when our sins have reached their height. Though he disciplines us with calamities, he does not forsake his own people. Now, Epiphanes wanted to fulfill Alexander's dream of creating a Greek empire, not through war, believe it or not, but through assimilation of Greek culture throughout all the world. Of course, he would use war if he had to. Today, we call this Hellenization. It comes from a word that means to go speak Greek or to identify with the Greeks. So Gabriel said this God-made manifest would be adept at understanding riddles. This is a literal translation of the phrase that has nothing to do with a game played in a cave by Gollum and Bilbo. Okay, Ezekiel 28 is a good parallel here. Here is the king of Tyre. He's called wiser than Daniel. That's the idea of riddles. because he considers himself to be a god, he's going to be destroyed like Satan. In other words, this little horn's wisdom is duplicitous. We see this in the next two verses in Daniel 24-25. It says, his power shall be great, but not by his own power. And he shall cause fearful destruction and shall succeed in what he does and destroy mighty men and the people who are the saints. By his cunning, he shall make deceit prosper under his hand and in his own mind he shall become great. Without warning, he shall destroy many. He shall even rise up against the prince of princes and he shall be broken, but by no human hand. So we might as well finish off this vision of Gabriel's interpretation. He concludes, the vision of the evenings and the mornings that has been told is true, but seal up the vision because it refers to many days from now. So in much of what I'm now going to say in terms of fulfillment of these things through Antiochus, I'm going to return to the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees to show you the historical fulfillment. The books of Maccabees are history books. There's four of them. though the first is probably the most accurate, historically speaking. They describe important events that take place in the intertestamental period. Specifically, they focus on the events in the Maccabean revolts during the Grecian rule of the Holy Land. More specifically, they focus on events beginning with Antiochus Epiphanes and later. It's primarily through them that we know about the exact fulfillment of Daniel 8 and as such have been called a record of priceless worth and one of the most valuable sources we possess for the history of Jewish people at this time. We've already seen how they add helpful information on Gabriel's statement of the sins of Greece reaching a tipping point. And it's into this tipping point that Antiochus comes to power. He became a very powerful tyrant over Israel. First Maccabees calls him a wicked root. Second Maccabees calls him, this is interesting, a raging wild animal. Where would it get that from? He set out to conquer Egypt, and then he invaded Persia. But never forget, his rise was not by his own power, Daniel says, it's by God's power. In a series of devastating attacks, he sought to take Jerusalem by storm, the Maccabees tell us. He does so and mercilessly massacres, this is what it says, young and old, women and children, virgins and infants. In the space of three days, 80,000 were lost, 40,000 meeting a violent death, the same number being sold into slavery. He entered proudly into the sanctuary and took away the golden altar, the candlestick of light, all the vessels thereof, and the table of the showbread, and the pouring vessels, and the vials, and the censers of gold, and the veil, and the crowns, and the golden ornaments that were before the temple, all which he pulled off. See, this explains why certain wicked Jews led by a fellow named Joshua, who's the younger brother of the high priest at the time, would Hellenize his name to Jason and then make a covenant with Epiphanes to defile the city. He brings in a gymnasium. He refuses to circumcise the boys. They forsake the covenant of God. They marry Gentiles. They do mischief. They're trying to stave off disaster. And Jason makes a bargain in order that Antiochus would replace his brother with him as the high priest. He sells out his entire country for that purpose. Compromising with the devil never works. If you play with fire, you're going to get burned. These events had a terrible consequence on the Jews. Many of them completely abandoned their religion. They consented to Greek religion, sacrificed to idols, profaned the Sabbath, set up altars and groves and chapels of idols, sacrificed swine's flesh and unclean beasts, left their children uncircumcised, made their souls abominable with all manner of uncleanness, forgot the law, changed the ordinances, committed evils in the land, all under the threat of death. You see, Antiochus' Hellenization is working perfectly. It was at this time that Antiochus goes into the temple, and it says, and he set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar. Here's what he did. He erects an altar to Jupiter Zeus. And he renames the temple after the God of thunder. He offers a pig on the altar in God's temple and causes the temple to become desolate. The idea is that Yahweh will no longer dwell in the midst of this unclean abomination. Can you hear the histories of the words of Daniel or of Gabriel here? This is a bold face who deceitfully turned over the Jews after they made a covenant with him. He brought fearful destruction such as has not been seen in Israel since the days of Nebuchadnezzar when the first temple was destroyed. He succeeded in everything he did and destroyed the people of God. He defiantly rose up against the prince of princes because this was his temple where he sat in throne. There came a time when after the sanctuary had been abandoned for several years, that a guy named Judas Maccabees rose up and after a series of military victories against the Greeks in the face of astounding odds against him, he came to the precipice of the temple and it says, when he saw the sanctuary desolate and the altar profaned and the gates burned up and the shrubs growing in the courts as in a forest, it had been totally abandoned. And the priest's chambers all pulled down. They rent their clothes and made great lamentation and caused ashes on their heads and fall down flat to the ground upon their faces and blew an alarm with trumpets and cried toward heaven. And Judas fought against those few still left in the fortress, chose priests of blameless conversation who had pleasure in the law and they cleansed the sanctuary. They created a new altar. They made new holy vessels. They brought back the candlestick the altar of burnt incense and offering, the table. They held a great feast and reinstituted the worship of the one true God. As for Antiochus, it says, when the king heard these words, he was astonished and sore moved, whereupon he laid him down on his bed and fell sick for grief. And there he continued many days, for his grief was ever more and more, and he made a count that he should die. And this is what he told his friends on his deathbed. He said, For this cause, these troubles have come upon me, and behold, I perish through great grief in a strange land. In Antiochus Epiphanes, God made flesh and died. As he rose by God's power, so also he died by no human hand, but in grief for the God of Israel tormenting him for what he had done to God's people. Curiously, scholars have noticed that all of these events happened either during a 2,300-day period or an 1,150-day period, depending on how you reckon it. This is fascinating to me. If we look at the longer time frame, we can count from 170 BC, when the priest Oneus was murdered by the Benjamite Menelaus, who then assumed a high priesthood as a non-Aranite, totally desecrating the temple. And then to the rededication of Judas Maccabee in 164, it's about 2,300 days. If we use the shorter date, we can see that it was approximately 1,150 days from the moment that Antiochus slaughtered the pig on the altar, thus bringing the abomination of desolation, until the same moment when Judas rededicated the temple. Now this understanding of the prophecies of Daniel 8 being about the Medes and Persians being overtaken by Alexander who then dies, his empire goes into the hands of his four officers. One of them has a very evil descendant who rises to such power in the Holy Land that he seeks to set himself above God himself only to find himself ruined. At the end, this has been the near universal interpretation, this passage, from Josephus to church fathers like Hippolytus and Theodoret, to reformers like Calvin on through today. So what are we to make of these things as we think about them? I'm gonna give you five things to consider. First, consider Daniel's own reaction. It says, and I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days, and I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it. The prophet of God has given a vision and an interpretation and yet he didn't even understand it even then. See sometimes prophecy is such that until the events occur it cannot be understood for what it is. That's the way it was with Jesus himself. All the prophecies that you and I take for granted as obvious were not quite that obvious until they were fulfilled. Now that doesn't mean there's nothing in them that could be understood ahead of time. Simeon and Anna had good ideas of what to expect when Jesus was born, but God concealed a good portion of their meaning until later, because you know what, if he didn't, Paul says they never would have crucified the Lord of glory. And if they would have not done that, we would not have forgiveness of our sins. To me, Daniel's reaction teaches us in the face of prophecy yet to be fulfilled, to be humble about what we think we know. Second, note what else it says in that verse, the last verse. Though he was appalled by the vision, I rose and went about the king's business. Too many Christians have abandoned all sense when they get sucked into future prophetic speculation. Some setting exact dates have sold all they have and lived on the top of the roofs awaiting the rapture, only to be disappointed. Daniel did not stop living his life. He continued on with the king's business. Though he surely means King Belshazzar, who had placed him in a very high position, we can think of it as King Jesus. And what does he say to us? He's not taking us out of the world. Rather, he leaves us here to be salt and light, so that men might see the salvation and change of life that occurs when Christ is worshiped. Our job is to go about our jobs as ambassadors of Jesus, doing our work well for our bosses, bearing Christ's name in our bodies, obeying him, being good and faithful workers until he decides when it's time for us to leave. Third, along with chapter seven, the interpretation of these prophecies demonstrates very clearly that the horror of human evil is especially concentrated in the state. Now I want you to listen well to this. This is an incredibly important lesson for anyone to learn, but especially people whose innate desire seems to be to willingly give more and more power to the state as they give away more and more of their own power that belongs to the individual. Human nature is such that one person is sinful, but my goodness, you get a whole collection of them with unlimited and unaccountable power, they become nearly as bad as they could be. The history of every civilization in history demonstrates this. And our own USA is no different. And we are perhaps the only nation in history that's actually tried to put safeguards in place to protect against this. And it still isn't working all that well. As one of our great presidents said in his inaugural address, in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. You all know that line. Government is the problem. Beware of the state telling you that they will fix all your problems. As it accumulates more and more power to itself, those who suffer are the poor, the downcast, and God's people, which is the exact opposite of what these people try to sell you through their serpentine tongues. Fourth, the fact that these are sanctuary animals rather than crazy beasts shows us that God intended something different from the previous chapter. God's typological people, the Jews, were going to be disciplined for their sins. Scripture is full of the thought that we will be persecuted as Christ, our brother, was. And we're not to seek this, but neither are we to flee from it. We are to embrace whatever God deems fit to put in our way, even as we may pray to work an end to the end that such things would not occur in our own day, like Daniel did. Too many Christians today have an easy believism. This is not what Daniel 8 allows you to conclude. Daniel was deeply distressed and it led him to repent of his sins and his people's sins and to work hard and to seek God's mercy. Have you repented of yours? Is your faith rooted in ease and comfort? If suffering and persecution should come, are you gonna go the way of the wind? Then you've not listened to God's word. This thought is made clearer in the next chapter, and at the same time, God restored their temple and sacrifices, meaning that, you know what? He had mercy on them. Even as the two animals belonged to the day of atonement, the goat and the ram, through them, God graciously gave to his people a means of atonement whereby they could be forgiven. And for us, he's done this through the once-for-all sacrifice of the Lamb of God. Make sure you don't leave this place without trusting in him for forgiveness and worshiping him in your heart as king. And then the final thing I want to tell you, in chapter 7, as we were made to think about the end of an age, that was the old covenant age with its rules and regulation that were centered upon the temple. At that time, God delivered the kingdom to the holy ones, to the church, and we've not looked back since. But in chapter eight, in going to a fulfillment earlier in history, we're to understand something different than we were then. History is both linear and cyclical. I've been taught in school that while the pagans see history as cyclical, Christians see it as linear. It's not an either or. There's both of these things here. It's like a river. It eventually ends in the ocean, so it's linear, but upon its banks, time ebbs and flows and rises and lowers according to the seasons and to change. The setting of the vision of Daniel 8 has to teach you the lessons of history. While it will end one day in Christ's glorious second coming, until then, there are patterns and cycles that repeat themselves. The prophecy of Persia and Greece climaxing in a great persecution of God's people, a disruption of his worship, a vindication of his glory. This has been the pattern of history. It didn't stop with Antiochus. And so you know what? Many Christians have seen not only an initial fulfillment in Antiochus, but subsequent fulfillments in Rome, in Islam, in the Papacy, in the Antichrist. I wouldn't say that there's more than one fulfillment here, but I would say that this prophecy is a type of history. Whether they be Jews before Christ or Christians after, whether it be under Nero or the Holy Roman Papal Empire or Anglican Britain or Atheist Russia or China or Christian America, that's what we should prepare for. This prophecy can help us understand and prepare to respond to God as God's people are supposed to. I want you to take then the lesson from the river and the vision and say in a deeper way than Longfellow said, river that in silence windest through the meadows bright and free, till at length thy rest thou findest in the bosom of the sea. Four long years of mingled feeling, half in rest and half in strife, I've seen thy water stealing onward like the streams of life. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for your word in Daniel here this morning. I do pray that you would cause us to think deeply on it, especially as we come into chapter nine next week and we think about Daniel's own reaction to this vision. It ought to humble us as we think about the reason for these punishments. It ought to cause us to become repentant of our own sins and to ask you and plead with you not to punish us, but to have mercy and kindness upon us because of Christ and because you have forgiven us. We thank you for this. We're going to celebrate it here in the Lord's Supper as we think about what Jesus did for us. I would ask that you would use your word to penetrate our minds and cause us to think better about that sacrifice that you gave once for all on the cross through Jesus offering up his body and blood. Be with us now as we come to the Lord's Supper, we ask in Christ's name, amen.